Time for a change

Whenever we meet a bank CTO and we start talking about applications, the subject of replacing core systems rarely comes up. It's to the point where we no longer even ask the question, since the reply is invariably, "It's too costly. We're fine with what we have in place."

Few would argue with the traditional view that core legacy system replacement is, well, nothing short of horrific. Thanks to silos and stovepipe architectures, an engineering schema of most banks' systems resembles a plate of spaghetti, with back office applications connecting to various consumer touchpoints with seemingly little rhyme or reason. To rewire the entire enterprise would take thousands of man hours and tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars.

How long bankers can maintain this attitude is open to conjecture. Banks are under pressure to stay viable in a competitive financial services marketplace. Experts say they need to become customer-centric, faster to market, and have a common feel across all channels. These goals will be hard to accomplish with a core that was built in the 1970s.

Banks need to replace aging core systems in a way that is low-risk, inexpensive, and non-disruptive to customers. With Line of Business Migration, Sanchez Computer Associates, a Malvern, Pa.-based supplier of financial services software systems, believes it has developed just such a solution. To learn more, read on.